Have you ever seen Gentoo trying to reach an agreement? We'll start the process off tomorrow, by 2011 someone might have put something down on paper, by 2012 they might have talked about it, by 2013 it might have got to the council, by 2014 a GLEP would have been proposed and by 2015 it would be obsolete.

Unfortunately Gentoo still lacks that authority figure to really get things moving

If it weren't true it wouldn't be so funny._________________

juniper wrote:

you experience political reality dilation when travelling at american political speeds. it's in einstein's formulas. it's not their fault.

Oh yeah, it's also nice how you can install yaourt and use it to manage official as well as AUR packages, rather than the situation with Sunrise in Gentoo, where you have to use emerge and layman separately.

Paludis could be an answer, it has a nice repositories management.

For the question at hand, I already put my efforts into another distro

We now have the autobuilds, so we have continuously up-to-date install media.

This is just one single example about the issue.

Yes there is progress on nearly all technical levels, there are various fantastic things rolling, but...

We - as a project - have *completely* missed to announce this 'our install medias are always up2date while all the others are outdated'-part in a way which is a)visible to the userbase or even b) attracting new users.
It's just there.

In other words we're not sexy enough to attract new users with new ideas. We've a solid userbase of mainly technically interested people and even those need to be excited now and then or they leave._________________Nothing is secure / Security is always a trade-off with usability / Do not assume anything / Trust no-one, nothing / Paranoia is your friend / Think for yourself

We now have the autobuilds, so we have continuously up-to-date install media.

This is just one single example about the issue.

Yes there is progress on nearly all technical levels, there are various fantastic things rolling, but...

We - as a project - have *completely* missed to announce this 'our install medias are always up2date while all the others are outdated'-part in a way which is a)visible to the userbase or even b) attracting new users.
It's just there.

In other words we're not sexy enough to attract new users with new ideas. We've a solid userbase of mainly technically interested people and even those need to be excited now and then or they leave.

Gentoo also doesn't exploit it's existing userbase enough. Sometimes you don't need to know everything about Gentoo or Linux to make it as a developer - people can be helped and coached. Maybe the first thing Gentoo should do is coach new recruits to coach new recruits? Get a big team of recruiters going._________________when you're sitting back, in your rose pink Cadillac
Making bets on Kentucky Derby Day
I'll be in my basement room, with a needle and a spoon
And another girl to take my pain away...

Also, it's probably people like speeddemon that you need the most: well informed, experienced users that feel like they've had enough and don't mind expressing it. Maybe if the developer community asked speeddemon what he feels should change then he wouldn't have answered before with such vigour

Actually, we need more people like you! People who can see both sides of a story, who have patience and understanding as well as a willingness to improve things. People who are constructive instead of just negative.

I don't think gentoo needs people who have their status revoked as a volunteer user representative for a piss poor attitude and rude obnoxious communication skills.

In other words we're not sexy enough to attract new users with new ideas. We've a solid userbase of mainly technically interested people and even those need to be excited now and then or they leave.

Well one of the biggest appeals of Gentoo is and always was the (perceived ?) better performance, with CPU getting always faster and memory always cheaper this pro is getting less attractive and cons like recompilation, outdated "stable", careless lib upgrades in ~arch are weighting more in the decisional process of choosing a distro.
Probably focusing more on netbooks could be a good idea, "netbook distro" is the new buzz ... and there the performance could be an advantage. What really would attract more people would probably be a change in philosophy, binary packages (using a fixed set of USE flags) should be the default, letting the user the possibilty of recompile what they want or even everything. It is not impossible to set-up things so that pre-compiled binaries with a fixed set of dependencies can coexist with self compiled (riced) packages with different ones, for example making "--newuse" default and presenting the user with the whole list of what should be recompiled if he changes them, or using different lib paths for self compiled stuff (/usr/local/lib?). This would open the new netbook market for gentoo (you cannot really recompile everything on a netbook) and first time users (noobs) could use the flavour of their choice without being scared away by the "complicated" technical details of recompilation. And of course the precompiled packages should be stable and not outdated, forcing everybody to choose between instable or outdated is not a philosophy that pays in the long. It gives the impression that devs are too lazy or not willing to take the responsibilty of declaring something stable, and care for bug reports.
About bug reports I find a good idea what Ubuntu is doing recently, a two levels system for bug reports, if a bug report is classified invalid it is turned into a question in a different support forum where everybody can answer (possibly also some devs ...). This should be easy to implement, a new forum in fgo where "invalid" or "wontfix" bug reports are exposed and can be answered automatically, and q couple of scripts. Sometimes users are too lazy to repeat their questions in the forums, esp if they received a bad answer in bgo.

It would be probably a good idea to also save the CFLAGS and CHOST information somewhere for installed things and make sure everything (or what is problematic) is compiled against the same set._________________Truck!!
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Well one of the biggest appeals of Gentoo is and always was the (perceived ?) better performance, with CPU getting always faster and memory always cheaper this pro is getting less attractive and cons like recompilation, outdated "stable", careless lib upgrades in ~arch are weighting more in the decisional process of choosing a distro.

Well, I can only speak for myself, but I like Gentoo because of the possibility to trim your system to your needs, and thus have a rather clean system that is clear and manageable.
However, since many packages have idiotic dependencies by design the advantage of Gentoo is less and less appealing to me. I am really looking forward to stali, it is an unorthodox approach at getting a clean and clear system. It is not yet usable though _________________The Creature from Jekyll Island.

Well, I can only speak for myself, but I like Gentoo because of the possibility to trim your system to your needs, and thus have a rather clean system that is clear and manageable.

Trimming down dependencies and services installed is part of the "ricing", for example on my vdr with 128Mb ram not upgradeable gentoo is ideal but on a recent machine with probably at least 2Gb and a dual core is not worth the effort if it is only to save resources. Having less dependencies makes it also easier to identify problems, but if "stable" was stable that were also less important _________________Truck!!
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Probably focusing more on netbooks could be a good idea, "netbook distro" is the new buzz ...

And probably a niche-market/dead-end.
I like Gentoo because i can throw it onto an ePC as i can use it on the 8core rig in the office to have a good server.
We shouldn't limit ourselfs by focussing on one type of machine (be it netbooks, servers, tablets, embedded or whatever).

We'd focus instead on things we're good at.
- brilliant documentation (but here we need a much broader scale and more up2date ones)
- elegant build/setup system
- fantastic forums/userbase (we've lost quite some here over the years but still we're one of the top ones imo)
- top-notch repository (have ~arch what it should be - the place for the very recent packages)

And we need to develop our skills on what we lack
- public relations
- innovative things (means we need to get creative people on board, not only mainly techies)
- involve our userbase whereever feasible
- quicker decissions in general_________________Nothing is secure / Security is always a trade-off with usability / Do not assume anything / Trust no-one, nothing / Paranoia is your friend / Think for yourself

Probably focusing more on netbooks could be a good idea, "netbook distro" is the new buzz ...

And probably a niche-market/dead-end.

I meant to attract new users, and maybe I should have said low-end machines instead of netbooks, obviously it should be usable on all kind of computers. Having binary packages, and advertising it properly, for low-end machines (including but not limited to netbooks) could attract new user with the "illusion" of better performances.

think4urs11 wrote:

- top-notch repository (have ~arch what it should be - the place for the very recent packages)

That is the main point, are you really sure that not including ~arch is so top-notch?
Consider that ubuntu and opensuse have already a beta out that will soon become official. Let's see next month if the ranking changes:
http://oswatershed.org/_________________Truck!!
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Probably focusing more on netbooks could be a good idea, "netbook distro" is the new buzz ...

And probably a niche-market/dead-end.
I like Gentoo because i can throw it onto an ePC as i can use it on the 8core rig in the office to have a good server.
We shouldn't limit ourselfs by focussing on one type of machine (be it netbooks, servers, tablets, embedded or whatever).

new profile: x86/netbook and amd64/netbook (possibly arm/netbook for the nice ones )..._________________iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAA

avatar: new version of logo - see topic 838248. Potentially still a WiP.

Probably focusing more on netbooks could be a good idea, "netbook distro" is the new buzz ...

And probably a niche-market/dead-end.

I meant to attract new users, and maybe I should have said low-end machines instead of netbooks, obviously it should be usable on all kind of computers. Having binary packages, and advertising it properly, for low-end machines (including but not limited to netbooks) could attract new user with the "illusion" of better performances.

think4urs11 wrote:

- top-notch repository (have ~arch what it should be - the place for the very recent packages)

That is the main point, are you really sure that not including ~arch is so top-notch?
Consider that ubuntu and opensuse have already a beta out that will soon become official. Let's see next month if the ranking changes:
http://oswatershed.org/

I don't know how much faith I'd put in that ranking as taking a look at: http://oswatershed.org/distro/gentoo#Future
and scrolling down and seeing current it looks quite outdated, to be honest.
They could be focusing on stable branches, but even then it looks a bit outdated.
But you're right, perhaps stats will be brought up to date with next release of opensuse and ubuntu _________________Einstein was a great man, but he got one thing wrong with his theory of relativity. E= MC hammer. As far as logic goes, this is flawed, but as a show of wit, you can't touch this

and still to this day ciaranm poisons Gentoo. One reason why probably 50% of the people here wouldn't dev for Gentoo_________________when you're sitting back, in your rose pink Cadillac
Making bets on Kentucky Derby Day
I'll be in my basement room, with a needle and a spoon
And another girl to take my pain away...

I moved this easter. Waiting for a net connection at home. But in the near future this means I'll have more free time, and I'd be interested in helping Gentoo. Possibly making ebuilds, although I haven't tried much beyond version-bumping before. Being a programmer I could see myself be interested in helping improve portage, though, as that seems like a favourite punching bag that is hovering right around the corner of what everyone wants, and just needs some more people helping out with it. I'll try to remember this and get motivated for helping Gentoo when I get my life back on track._________________

new profile: x86/netbook and amd64/netbook (possibly arm/netbook for the nice ones )...

Don't know what is the status of arm but you might end up keywording half of the tree, and possibly start a new arch war (remember mips? )
Better stick with x86 _________________Truck!!
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